the
prayer
that changes everything
Discovering the Power of St. Ignatius Loyolaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Examen

JIM MANNEY

contents
preface

vii

1 the examen in a nutshell

1

2 why is this a good way to pray?

5

3 some problems that the examen solves
(at least partly)

13

4 step one: pray for light

23

5 step two: give thanks

31

6 step three: review the day

39

7 step four: face what’s wrong

51

8 step five: do something—but not just anything

61

9 the real-time examen

71

now it’s your turn

81

a note on language, resources, and sources

83

v

1

the examen in a nutshell
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention.
—Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

The examen is a method of reviewing your day in the presence of
God. It’s actually an attitude more than a method, a time set aside
for thankful reflection on where God is in your everyday life. It
has five steps, which most people take more or less in order, and
it usually takes 15 to 20 minutes per day. Here it is in a nutshell:
1. Ask God for light.
I want to look at my day with God’s eyes, not merely
my own.
2. Give thanks.
The day I have just lived is a gift from God. Be grateful for it.
3. Review the day.
I carefully look back on the day just completed,
being guided by the Holy Spirit.
4. Face your shortcomings.
I face up to what is wrong—in my life and in me.
5. Look toward the day to come.
I ask where I need God in the day to come.
1

2 the examen in a nutshell

Simple? Yes. Easy? Not really. Sometimes praying the examen is
smooth and joyful; sometimes it’s arduous. If the examen prayer
is doing its job, it will bring up painful moments and cause you to
look at behavior that’s embarrassing. Sometimes you squirm praying the examen, but why would you have it otherwise? Real prayer
is about change, and change is never easy.
But there’s nothing complicated or mysterious about making
the examen part of your life. The subject matter of the examen is
your life—specifically the day you have just lived through. The
examen looks for signs of God’s presence in the events of the day:
lunch with a friend, a walk in the park, a kind word from a colleague, a challenge met, a duty discharged. The examen likes the
humdrum. God is present in transcendent “spiritual” moments,
but he’s also there when you cook dinner, write a memo, answer
email, and run errands. The examen looks at your conscious
experience. The ebb and flow of your moods and feelings are full
of spiritual meaning. Nothing is so trivial that it’s meaningless.
What do you think about while sitting in traffic or waiting in a
long line at the grocery store? What’s your frame of mind while
doing boring and repetitive chores? You’ll be surprised at how significant such moments can be when you really look at them.
The examen surprised me because it was so unlike prayer as I
had previously understood it. Prayer for me was a time set apart.
With the examen the boundaries between prayer and life became
blurred. People usually pray the daily examen at a set time (for me
usually in the morning), but there’s no reason why we can’t pray

the examen in a nutshell 3

the examen while standing in that long line at the grocery store.
After all, God is there too.
But in another way the examen didn’t surprise me at all. God
is certainly there while you’re standing in line. All you need to
pray the examen is a little quiet time. This made intuitive sense. I
am God’s creature living in God’s world; of course God would be
present in my everyday experience. If prayer is making a connection with God, it makes perfect sense to spend some time finding
God in my conscious experience of daily life.
In fact, the examen is a very old practice. The word examen
comes from a Latin word that means both an examination and
the act of weighing or judging something. It’s as old as Socrates’s
instruction to “know thyself.” A practice of regular self-scrutiny is
found in most religions of the world, and this is certainly the case
with Christianity. To follow the path of Jesus, we must regularly
scrutinize our behavior and ask how closely our actions conform
to Christ’s.
Five hundred years ago, St. Ignatius of Loyola made an innovative twist on this ancient tradition of prayerful reflection. He
made it a way to experience God as well as to assess our behavior. Ignatius’s famous book The Spiritual Exercises is a guide to
an intense experience of conversion to the cause of Christ. He
designed the daily examen to sustain and extend this experience.
Ignatius wanted to help people develop a reflective habit of mind
that is constantly attuned to God’s presence and responsive to
God’s leading. The examen became the foundation for this graced

4 the examen in a nutshell

awareness. Ignatius wanted Jesuits to practice the examen twice a
day—at noon and before sleep. He considered it so important that
he insisted that Jesuits pray the examen even when they were too
busy to pray in other ways.
Over the centuries, the practice of the Ignatian examen has
taken on different forms. For a long time it closely resembled
the Examination of Conscience that troubled the prayer of my
youth. In recent decades Jesuits have been restoring the examen to
something more closely resembling Ignatius’s original vision for a
prayer practice that would help us find God in our everyday lives
and respond more generously to his gifts and blessings. That’s the
form of the examen that’s presented in this book.
I’ve read everything about the examen that I could find.
Interestingly, there’s not a lot written about it. Except for a couple
of small books and a few learned essays, most of what I found has
been pamphlets, flyers, and web pages that give a brief overview.
That’s not really a surprise because most people learn about prayer
by talking to other people. News of the examen spreads by word
of mouth. But at some point a book might be helpful, at least for
some people. I hope this is that book.
The examen isn’t the only way to pray, but it’s a way that everyone can pray. It banishes the abstract and relishes the concrete. It
is inexhaustible. It treats every moment of every day as a blessed
time when God can appear. It’s a way to find God in all things.

2

why is this
a good way to pray?
God is not remote from us. He is at the point
of my pen, my pick, my paint-brush, my
needle—and my heart and my thoughts.
—Pierre Theilhard de Chardin, SJ, Hymn of the Universe

What’s not to like about the examen? It’s simple; it’s about the
stuff we do every day; it connects us to God; it helps us walk
with Christ in our daily rounds. It sounds like the perfect prayer.
What’s the catch?
I began to talk up the examen as soon as I started using it
as a prayer practice, and it wasn’t long before one of my friends
gave me a skeptical look. “Why is sifting through our memories of
the past twenty-four hours a sound way to pray?” she asked. Our
memories aren’t reliable. She told me a story about discovering
that something she remembered very vividly never happened at
all. She pointed out that we all filter our memories through preconceptions and desires; we tend to “remember” things the way we
wish they had happened. Oh, and there was one other thing. The
examen struck her as being very self-centered. She asked, “What’s
to keep it from becoming a play starring myself as the hero of a
one-person show?”
5

6 why is this a good way to pray?

Good questions. The examen doesn’t make immediate sense
to everyone; it isn’t like most prayer. The examen is not liturgical
prayer, devotional prayer, intercession, or prayer with scripture. It’s
not contemplation or centering prayer, which involve emptying
our minds of images, words, and ideas. It’s not the kind of prayer
that lifts our hearts to a God who stands apart from our lives.
From the perspective of capital “P” prayer, the examen hardly
looks like prayer at all. It’s a way of looking at ordinary life in a
certain way. So why exactly is this a good way to pray?

The big theological answer
The theological answer is that God really is present in our world.
He is here, not up there. Christianity has much in common with
other religions, one of them being the practice of a discipline of
self-scrutiny. But there are differences too, and the main one is the
Christian belief that God became human in Jesus Christ. God’s
project of saving our world involves God becoming personally
caught up in the lives his creatures lead. This is the doctrine of the
Incarnation—the conviction that the God who created men and
women has intimate knowledge of their lives because he is human
as well as divine.
Personal is the key word. God is a community of three
persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and the relationship we
have with God is a personal one as well. The word for it is friendship, says Jesuit spiritual director William Barry. Nothing in our
lives is so insignificant that it doesn’t deserve God’s attention. In
fact, the mundane and the humdrum parts of our lives give depth

why is this a good way to pray? 7

and texture to our relationship with God.
Nothing in our lives
Washing the windows and cooking dinis so insignificant
ner are as much a part of the relationship
that it doesn’t
deserve God’s
as graduation day. If it’s part of our human
attention.
experience, God is in it.
God is present to us in many other ways
too—in creation itself, in the scriptures, and in the history of the
Christian community. We connect with God through many
forms of prayer, including communal worship, silent meditation,
devotional practices, and formal prayers. The examen focuses on
God as present in our human experience. This doesn’t represent
our whole relationship with God but it’s a vital part of it.

The down-to-earth practical answer
That’s the theological argument for the examen. The other argument is a practical one. Experience shows that the examen can be
a central element in a vibrant spiritual life.
The man who discovered this was St. Ignatius of Loyola.
Ignatian spirituality, the spiritual tradition associated with
Ignatius, has become a sophisticated discipline. There’s a lot to
it. People study it, write books about it, and earn doctorates in
it. But Ignatian spirituality is also intensely practical. Just about
everything to do with Ignatian spirituality originated in the life of
Ignatius. Discernment, imaginative prayer, an approach to making decisions, and the other components of what later became
Ignatian spirituality all sprang from Ignatius’s needs and the needs
of his friends. These spiritual practices were practical responses to

8 why is this a good way to pray?

real-world problems. Ignatius did not invent a spiritual system; he
discovered certain truths, which he knew were true because he saw
how they helped people thrive spiritually.
Ignatius was a careful and perceptive observer—a great
“noticer.” I imagine him as something of a detective in the spiritual realm. He noticed clues that eluded others. That’s how he
found God, and that’s how the examen came about.

A soldier’s daydreams
Ignatius was a Basque, coming from an ancient people in the
mountains of northern Spain who had a reputation for toughness and independence. The young Ignatius was no saint; he was
a soldier and a strutting courtier who liked the ladies. In 1515 he
was arrested for street fighting, making him one of the few saints
with a police record. In 1521, when he was about thirty, he was
badly wounded in battle and spent many months recovering in his
family castle. He became intolerably bored and asked for something to read. His literary tastes favored romances and adventure
stories—the sixteenth-century equivalent of Harry Potter and
John Grisham novels. He was disappointed to learn that the only
books in the house were a life of Christ and a collection of stories
about saints. Reluctantly, he read what was available.
Ignatius liked the religious books more than he thought he
would. The life of Christ stirred him, and he was inspired by
the lives of the saints. He imagined what it would be like doing
heroic deeds for God as St. Francis and St. Dominic did (he surmised that he would do better than Francis and Dominic). After a

why is this a good way to pray? 9

while the lure of the saints diminished, and he took to daydreaming about his past life—his lady loves, the excitement of battle,
and the deeds of derring-do that he hoped to accomplish again
someday. Eventually these fantasies would recede, and he would
again dream about the lives of the saints and imagined how good
it would be to serve God. This is how Ignatius spent the lonely
weeks and months of convalescence—alternating in his imagination between dreams of glory and romance and dreams of following Jesus.
The big question that loomed in the background was the one
familiar to thirty-year-olds everywhere: what am I going to do
with my life? Ignatius’s dreams of military glory and knightly
valor were just that—dreams.
His emotions were unsettled. Some days he would feel happy
and confident; other days he would be restless and troubled. He
began to notice a pattern in his feelings. Eventually the light bulb
went on: his feelings were related to his imaginative life. His daydreams were always fun, but the emotions that followed them
were different. He was joyful and confident after dreaming about
following Christ. He was agitated and sad after daydreaming of
machismo, lust, and honor.
Ignatius realized that these feelings weren’t just fleeting
moods; they had spiritual meaning. God was in the feelings of joy
he felt after thinking about a life of service to God. Some other
spirit, an “evil” spirit, was in the feelings of gloom and agitation
that followed thoughts of his old life. He realized that something
important was going on, that God was communicating with him

10 why is this a good way to pray?

through his emotions. The peace and joy seemed to point to the
answer to the “what’s next?” question. Before long Ignatius understood that the lasting fulfillment he sought would come by following Christ. For the rest of his life, Ignatius built on the insight
he had received during those long months of recovery—that he
could hear God by carefully attending to the movements of his
inner life.

God in our experience
This is the “genesis story” of Ignatian spirituality because so many
of its principles are seen here in embryonic form. One is that we
can trust our experience. God spoke to Ignatius about the most
important decision of his life through the emotions associated
with his convalescence. Books and ideas and the counsel of the
wise are fine, but the vital place where we find God is in what we
ourselves experience. Like Ignatius, we can discern the right path
by thoughtful reflection on our relationships with others, on our
work in the world, and on the feelings generated by those encounters. The examen is a way to do this.
We can trust our experience because God deals with us
directly. That’s another principle of Ignatian spirituality. The
church and scripture teach truth, and sacraments and devotional
prayer nourish us, but God also communicates directly with each
of us. We can have a personal relationship with God.
Another principle found at the beginning of Ignatius’s story
is the importance of the journey. Ignatius arose from his sickbed
determined to serve God. But, especially during the early years

why is this a good way to pray? 11

after his conversion, he walked a meandering spiritual path full
of U-turns, blind alleys, dead ends, false starts, and odd tangents.
God was with Ignatius every step of the way. At the end of his
life, Ignatius wrote a short autobiography in which he referred to
himself in the third person as “the pilgrim.” He saw his life as a
journey, marked by deepening understanding of who God was
and how he could best serve him.
My skeptical friend raised real issues; memories can be unreliable, and a prayer like the examen, in which we reflect on our
experience, can become self-centered. But these are pitfalls to
be avoided, not big red signs saying ROAD CLOSED. Ignatius
found a way down the road. He developed the examen to help him
to find God on the journey. We pray it for the same reason.